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Communication History and Its Research Subject1 COMMUNICATION HISTORY AND ITS RESEARCH SUBJECT1 Emanuel KULCZYCKI 2 Abstract: The article proposes a way of defining the research subject of the history of communication. It concentrates on the use of philosophical tools in the study of the collective views of communication practices. The study distinguishes three aspects in the research subject: the means and forms of communication, the collective views of communication practices and communication practices as such. On the theoretical level, these aspects are reflected in various studies undertaken in the fields of media history, the history of the idea of communication and the history of communication practices. The analysis is conducted from a meta-theoretical point of view which places the argument within two orders: that of the research subject and that of the discipline. To give an outline of the current state of research, a distinction is introduced between an implicit and an explicit history of communication. The effect of these considerations is presented in a diagram that specifies the aspects of the research subject as well as the relationships between them. Keywords: communicology, communication practices, reflexive historicizing, communication theory, media. 1. Introduction Scientific research on communication has been undertaken since the first half of the 20th century. Naturally, communication itself, as well as reflection on it, has a much longer history. However, in the pre-scientific studies on what we now call communication, neither the term itself, nor even the notion of communication appears most of the time.3 1 Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Michał Wendland, Mikołaj Domaradzki, Paweł Gałkowski and Stanisław Kandulski for their valuable observations. I am grateful to Graham Crawford for numerous editorial and linguistic remarks. This article was written as part of the project “A History of the Idea of Communication. An Analysis of Transformations of Communication Practice and Its Social Conditions from the Perspective of Philosophy of Culture” financed by the National Science Centre in Poland, decision number DEC- 2011/03/D/HS1/00388. 2 Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. 3The concept of communication is relatively recent, and the roots of the modern understanding of this concept should be sought in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the works Analele Universităţii din Craiova•Seria Filosofie | 133 The main purpose of this article is to show which phenomena, objects, views, ideas or practices can be analysed as part of the interdisciplinary studies we call communication history. The categories listed above are regarded as the research subject of communication history. The research problem examined in this article is how to combine the various aspects of the research subject of communication history into a model that makes it possible to describe the relationships between them. Communication history studies issues related to communication, be it interpersonal, group, organisational, or institutional: this means that all the different levels1, means and forms of communication are taken into account. The definition of communication I have used here arises from constitutive (otherwise ritual or interactive) interpretations.2 Such approaches allow for additional categorizations, created on the basis of various metatheoretical premises (ontological, epistemological, praxeological, axiological). The approach I adopted can be classified as an interpretative theory which may be contrasted – in terms of constitutive approaches – with normative theories (e.g., Juergen Habermas’ theory of communicative action). I do not study what communication should be, nor how we should communicate. The understanding of communication which I adopt, which allows me to discuss the research subject of communication history, assumes that what communication is, how historical communities communicate and what they used to communicate, is primarily the result of the state of a given culture. In contrast to transmission models which focus on the analysis of synchronous elements (channel, sender, transmitter etc.), I focus on the cultural instrumentation of communicators. Therefore, I shall assume that communication is a form of action that can be understood within the context of a given culture.3 As such, it is of scholars such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Charles Horton Cooley or Edward Burnett Tylor (Simonson, Peck, Craig, & Jackson 2013: 16–20). 1 Dennis McQuail's classification of communication levels can be regarded as a classic description (McQuail: 17–19). 2 These interpretations emphasise the fact that communication is not just a simple transmission of information, emotions, concepts, but is composed of many different aspects of interaction. Among the works that present this type of approach, I can single out: Communication as Culture (Carey 2009), “Communication Theory as a Field” (Craig 1999), Communication, Action, and Meaning. The Creation of Social Realities (Pearce & Cronen 1980). 3 I have accepted Wade Goodenough's definition of culture, who defined it as everything an individual needs to know, or believe in, in order to act within society in such a way as to be accepted. Goodenough writes: “Culture, in this sense, did not consist of patterns of recurring events in a community, though in practice it was often taken to be such and was argued by 134 | Emanuel KULCZYCKI intentional, rational and requires interpretation. Where at least two individuals participate in it, they use the appropriate signs. The primary function of communication is to enable individuals to function within a culture. The set of these actions on the social level is called communication practice, thanks to which a given culture can be (re)produced. Every communication is realized on an individual and social level. The individual level is the specific action, whereas the social level (i.e., the various communication practices) realizes and maintains the social needs from which communication at the individual level arises.1 This connotes that communication, or more precisely communicative action, obtains its cultural meaning by being an element of a broader communication practice (which is why communication history mostly studies communication practices, instead of individual actions). As James Carey writes: ‚communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed‛(Carey 2009: 19). Such an action accomplishes various goals, usually reduced to the transmission of information, ideas, emotions or the creation of social bonds, understanding or symbolic interaction. This general definition of this basic term is necessary in order to define the largest possible group of these phenomena, things, ideas and practices which we shall consider as communicative (naturally, as part of further analysis, their characteristics shall have to be better defined). This will be presented in the order of the research subject, where I will indicate and describe three aspects of this subject. Furthermore, I shall also outline the order of the discipline, within which I distinguish three levels: the research subject (i.e. the whole order of the research subject), the theory and the metatheory.2 Therefore, if we consider culture, as well as practices and views, as subject to historical change, then we should also accept that communication cultural materialists to be only such (...) Rather, as something learned, culture was like a language, which is not what its speakers say but what they need to know to communicate acceptably with one another, including constructing utterances never made before yet immediately intelligible to others” (Goodenough 2003: 6). 1 The distinction can be illustrated by the following example: when a child asks their mother for a toy in the shop, the child not only realizes their goal (communicates – through acting – that it wants the toy), but also maintains the functioning of language in our culture (at the social level the practice of communication maintains the possibility of “practicing communication”. What is particularly important is that, the performer, i.e., the child, does not have to be aware of that. 2 The relations between these orders and their elements will be outlined further in Figure 2. Analele Universităţii din Craiova•Seria Filosofie | 135 should likewise be studied as a historical process.1 This ‚historicization of communication‛ is shown as one of the modern approaches in contemporary studies of communication history. We should therefore remember that ‚communicating about communication‛ is also subject to historical evolution. When examining diachronically the social changes that result from changes in communication practices, one needs to assume that practices are culturally grounded. That is why in the present paper I assume a constitutive account of communication process, i.e., an account that is not founded on an assumption about the universal (historically unchangeable) essence of communication. Such a fixed component in the alternative transmission approach is, for example, the assumption about the transferring (coding and decoding) of the thoughts between two individuals (e.g. in Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, or Michael Reddy’s research within cognitive linguistics). Therefore, the transmission model is not useful for sketching a mind map in the history of communication, that is, to achieve the purpose of this article. It limits the range of phenomena which can be called communication
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